Inside the Alcatraz Mess Hall: Food, Security and Routine

Meals were the main break in a monotonous day on Alcatraz, and the dining hall was also considered the most dangerous room on the island. This page looks at both sides.

A risky room

The reasoning was simple: hungry, resentful men with metal utensils, three times a day. Inmates could avoid enemies in the cellhouse or at work, but at meals they were exposed, and tables were set with forks, spoons and even steak knives when the menu called for them.

Security was therefore serious. Unarmed guards patrolled inside, several tear gas canisters were fixed to the ceiling, armed officers watched from a catwalk outside the windows, and the officer in the west-end gun gallery also observed the room.

The food

The sameness of people, work and surroundings was broken mainly by the menu, and food was treated almost as a part of the security programme. It had a reputation as the best in the federal system. Officials said they spent more per inmate than other prisons, and there was plenty for everyone. The guards ate the same meals in their own dining room.

Reports say federal regulations required a minimum of 2,100 calories per inmate a day, while at Alcatraz men generally received over 3,000. The tables had fresh bread and pastries, butter, and pie or ice cream for dessert. Wartime rationing and budget pressure caused occasional problems, but given conditions in the country during the Depression and the war, the meals were considered a fair deal, and well-fed men were calmer.

Inmates could take as much as they liked. Leaving food on the tray, however, could cost a person the next meal, and a repeat could bring harsher punishment.

When things went wrong

There were some table-flipping food fights, either to relieve boredom or to press for better food or treatment, and the odd fist fight. Still, the armed guards outside seldom had to break the windows with rifle butts, and never had to fire a warning shot or release the gas.

A low point came when Warden Johnston, standing at the dining hall door as he did each week, was beaten up by an angry inmate named Burton “Whitey” Phillips. Phillips was placed in the Treatment Unit and reportedly stayed there until Johnston retired several years later.

Who cooked and served

Inmates did, under civilian stewards employed by the government. Men who worked in the kitchen said the stewards mostly supervised and handled paperwork behind the glass walls of an office, while convicts performed nearly all the preparation and serving.

It was an odd arrangement: two unarmed stewards in a small room surrounded by men with cleavers and butcher knives. They counted all cutlery before anyone was released from kitchen duty, and kitchen workers were often put through a metal detector or searched on the way out.

Knives from the kitchen did cause harm on two occasions. In 1945 Rufus Franklin stabbed Henri Young in the recreation yard. A year later, at the start of the failed 1946 breakout, kitchen worker Marvin Hubbard took a butcher knife, and he was found dead holding it two days afterwards in the C Block utility corridor.

How a meal ran

Cell doors were opened tier by tier and the main-line inmates came out in sequence. They marched in and split into two lines at the steam tables in front of the kitchen. Service was cafeteria style, using trays divided into five compartments. Most items were self-served in any amount, but the main dish and dessert were generally portioned by the kitchen crew.

Men carried trays to tables of ten, which was the arrangement for most years, checked that their utensils were in the right places and waited for a guard’s signal to sit. When all ten had finished, another signal, along with a second utensil count, allowed them to stand and go back to the cellhouse.

The whole service usually took under an hour, so that the first table was leaving just as the last group walked in.

Related pages: maximum custody, the 1946 riot and facts and figures.